McLaren F1 boss Andreas Seidl says he's team isn't giving up yet on its chances of snatching P3 in the Constructors' championship from Ferrari, as long as its "theoretically possible".
McLaren appeared to have one foot on the final step of the Constructors' podium in the back half of the 2021 season but four consecutive races in which it was outscored by Ferrari has handed third place to the Italian outfit.
Furthermore, the points difference between the two teams in Mexico and in Brazil has provided the Scuderia with a 31.5-point buffer that will be hard to overhaul for McLaren if its rival continues to outperform.
"Clearly we have to face reality," Seidl said. "If everything goes well for Ferrari until the end of the season, it will be difficult.
"At the same time as long as it’s theoretically possible, we’ve seen several times this year and last year what can happen in race weekends.
"We will try to hang in there but more importantly is simply now, as I said before, to come back to scoring the results that are possible for us.
"I think in the last two race weekends we didn’t have the strongest car in this battle we were in, but it was still possible to score good results and this is what we didn’t manage, and that’s what we need to do better."
After its blockbuster 1-2 triumphant weekend in Monza, McLaren's performance relative to Ferrari not only receded, it also only succeeded in putting both its cars among the top ten in two of the last five events.
Seidl says there are mitigating factors to justify the shortfall, but the team's lack of consistency has cost it dearly recently in its battle with the House of Maranello.
"If you’re up against a strong Ferrari, obviously the key in order to stay in the battle, which was the objective, is to keep scoring continuously with both cars like we did more in the first half of the season," explained the German.
"As I said before we simply didn’t manage it as a team to score the points that were on the table for us.
"If you look at the incidents that we had in Mexico, the first lap, it’s costing us a lot of points.
"We had weekends where we didn’t maximise the package in terms of performance which cost us a lot of points on tracks like Zandvoort or Turkey.
"In the end, that resulted in these bad weekends and in the end put us on the backfoot in the Constructors’ Championship."
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